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Toronto » A film festival is a place where it's all going on: the stars, the glamour, the dealmaking, the parties and -- most important -- the films.
But the truth about a major film festival -- whether it's Sundance or Telluride or the Toronto Film Festival, which concludes its 10-day run this weekend -- is that it really is all going on. And when it's all going on, there's the overwhelming sense that no matter where you were, you should be somewhere else.
Toronto is the biggest film festival in North America, with more than 300 films on its slate. Toronto's spectrum makes room for low-budget indies looking for a distributor, international films seeking a North American
There's a heavier studio presence here than at Sundance, as several blockbusters -- from mainstream comedies like "Whip It" and "Jennifer's Body" to prestige pictures like the Cormac McCarthy adaptation "The Road" and Jane Campion's "Bright Star" -- roll out to audiences without critics complaining that the festival has sold out.
"It's a huge launching pad," Thom Powers, the festival's documentary programmer, told me, adding that Toronto attracts a higher concentration of the world's film journalists and industry than any other event.
Attending the festival is like dipping a spoon into nearby Lake Ontario. One has to make choices, but each choice means missing out on some other shouldn't-be-missed event.
Catching Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page on the red carpet for Barrymore's directing debut "Whip It," complete with a demonstration by Toronto's local roller-derby league, meant missing Oprah Winfrey at another red carpet across town. Watching Michael Moore's latest documentary, the hard-hitting "Capitalism: A Love Story," meant missing the premiere of "Up in the Air" and seeing George Clooney in person.
What you don't see for yourself, you hear about from other festivalgoers. That's how buzz starts.
The buzz I heard loudest was for "Up in the Air," a comedy-drama by director Jason Reitman about a corporate downsizing expert (played by Clooney) who is obsessed about his frequent-flier miles -- until he meets a woman (Vera Farmiga) with similar traveling patterns. The movie could score multiple nominations for Reitman (who wrote the screenplay, adapting Walter Kirn's novel) and for Clooney.
Toronto served as a reunion of sorts for the "Juno" crew: Reitman brought "Up in the Air" and produced the horror movie "Jennifer's Body," written by "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, which also played here, while Page
Another Oscar contender, "Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire" -- which won top honors from the jury and the audience at its premiere at Sundance in January -- had its coming-out party at Toronto. The movie was nearly upstaged, though, by its executive producer: Oprah.
A lesser-known name at Toronto who might be -- or, in my mind, should be -- mentioned in any Oscar talk is Michael Stuhlbarg, a New York stage actor in his first leading role in a movie, in the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man." This offbeat tale follows a physics professor (played by Stuhlbarg) beset with marital, professional and spiritual crises. The Coens say the story is fictional, but the details are
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"A Serious Man," in its depiction of this professor's search for answers, prompted conversations about Judaism and faith in general. Such thoughtfulness was a contrast to one of the louder controversies swirling around Toronto, over a "City to City" program that spotlighted movies from Tel Aviv.
One filmmaker pulled his short film from the festival in protest of the Tel Aviv program. An open letter to the festival, signed by British filmmaker Ken Loach and Canadian sociologist Naomi Klein, accused the festival of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine" and ignoring the plight of Palestinians in Israel. The letter was countered by other filmmakers, including Ivan Reitman (Jason's dad) and David Cronenberg, who called the protest "political censorship."
Amid the big names and big stories of Toronto, there were small discoveries and oddities to be found for those willing to dig.
Utah filmmakers Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi found a receptive audience for their documentary "Cleanflix," which chronicles the short-lived industry (which boomed in Utah a few years ago) of editing DVDs for offensive content. The movie, and the Q&A session after, sparked some fascinating conversations about censorship, copyright and family responsibility.
Not all the documentaries at Toronto were as engaging. I saw two back-to-back -- "Ahead of Time," a profile of foreign correspondent Ruth Gruber and her accounts of watching the birth of the nation of Israel; and "Google Baby," a look at surrogate motherhood being farmed out to India -- that went longer than the subject matter required.
"Green Days," a movie that straddles the line between documentary and fiction, is worth every minute, though. Writer-director Hana Makhmalbaf -- daughter of the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf ("Gabbeh," "Kandahar") -- follows Ava, a playwright whose work is banned by the Ahmadinejad regime, asking existential questions as she walks amid the campaign rallies for reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi before June's disputed elections.
Makhmalbaf incorporates cameraphone footage of the bloody street protests after the elections, turning "Green Days" into an Iranian version of "Medium Cool," Haskell Wexler's classic look at the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago. The film has a sense of immediacy, not just because it depicts events that only happened three months ago, but because it makes you feel you're living them, too.
Going back to the '60s rebellion of "Medium Cool," Canadian filmmaker Reginald Harkema digs around the American demons of Nixon, Vietnam and Charles Manson with his deliberately campy drama, "Leslie, My Name Is Evil."
Harkema spotlights one of Manson's followers, an ex-homecoming queen named Leslie (Kristen Hager), and her alluring effect on a young Christian juror (played by "Everwood's" Geoffrey Smith).
It takes cojones to turn the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders into fodder for a satirical look at the clash between the hippie generation and their straitlaced parents, which makes the tepid results all the more surprising. Harkema pays homage to John Waters (who attended Manson's trial), but a little of Waters' trashy outrageousness would have added some spice.
Still, sitting in that Toronto audience, as moviegoers watched this strangely alluring idea play out and wondered what the hell the director had in mind, there was no doubt that this was the right place to be.
